It is well known that hospitality establishments, herein defined as hotels, motels, hospitals, condominiums and the like, operate in a highly competitive environment. In order to attract customers and generate additional revenue, such hospitality establishments often offer a wide variety of services, including an assortment of video entertainment services. In addition to broadcast and cable television, hotels and motels often have video services systems that offer pay-per-view and video-on-demand services, as well as a variety of interactive services. Pay-per-view services are scheduled movie services that generally utilize analog video cassette players installed in a remote location within the facility. The cassette players are preloaded with selected video cassette tapes to be broadcast at predetermined, or scheduled, times. The programming can be accessed by multiple television sets (TVs) at any given time while the transmission is in progress.
Video-on-demand services enable customers to select a program to be viewed at their convenience. Viewing times are not prescheduled and customers are typically given a choice of a large number of programming alternatives (typically from eight (8) to fifty (50)). Typically, the selected programming is transmitted in such a manner that only the customer that selected the programming is able to receive the broadcast. Alternatively, some video-on-demand systems provide "join-in-progress" capability, such that other customers also may view the selected programming. As with pay-per-view, the programming is stored on analog video cassette tapes. A video-on-demand system may include a robotic device that removes the video tape containing the selected programming from a storage rack and places it in one of several appropriate video cassette players. Alternatively, the system may include large numbers of individual video cassette players--one video cassette player for each video cassette tape. The customer's selection of a particular program activates only the video cassette player containing the desired programming.
Despite the capability of the prior art video services systems, it has become clear that advancements in the art are needed for many reasons. For example, delivery of the video cassette tapes for pay-per-view and video-on-demand services, as well as the maintenance and upkeep for the video cassette players, is labor intensive and costly. In almost all cases, the video services system that provides pay-per-view and video-on-demand programming, as well as broadcast and cable television, is owned and managed by a specialist company (e.g., Spectradyne) and not by the hospitality establishment. This specialist company typically delivers the cassette video tapes for the pay-per-view and video-on-demand services and maintains the video cassette players. It is common to provide six (6) to eight (8) pay-per-view movies and change all of them at least once a month. As previously indicated, video-on-demand systems may offer as many as fifty (50) movies, only twenty percent (20%) of which will typically be changed out in a given month. Typically, an employee of the company which owns and manages the video services system drives to the facility with the video tapes, loads them into the video cassette players, and takes the old tapes back. If the establishment is at an isolated location, the industry standard is to mail the cassette tapes and have the hospitality establishment mail the old tapes back "Cash On Delivery" (COD). Clearly, regardless of the method used to change out the tapes, a not insignificant expense is incurred by either the hospitality establishment or the management company in doing so.
Methods of compressing and encoding digital video signals and delivering encoded and compressed digital video signals to a set top converter by a communication means are well known in the art. The set top converter decodes and decompresses the signals and converts them to NTSC format for delivery to the TV. Methods of storing encoded and compressed digital video signals in a computer referred to as a "video server," as well as methods of transmitting data via satellite, are also well known in the art. Other video delivery systems, such as that described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,947,244 to Fenwick et al., transmit standard, radio frequency signals to room televisions from traditional, mechanical video tape players.
Analog systems, such as Fenwick et al. described above, do not anticipate the integration of digital video servers or the reception of video programming from a centralized video source via transmission means. In addition, such systems do not permit customers to interact with video programming using video cassette recorder (VCR) type commands and do not anticipate the integration of payment means, such as in-room magnetic card stripe readers. Finally, digitized video distribution systems that utilize video servers are beginning to be implemented. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,133,079, 5,172,413 and 5,130,792 to Ballentyne, Bradley and Tindell, respectively, do anticipate and even explicitly teach the addition of a digitial video server to the system, but at the expense of an entire network upgrade. These systems require the addition of sophisticated switching systems, such as asynchronous transfer mode switches, new transmission networks, and set top units that can decode the transmissions.
Accordingly, the foregoing solutions suffer certain deficiencies, due to the fact that the hospitality market requires access to video server technology, without the expense of implementing switches, networks and set top units mentioned above and without waiting for other entities, such as local television companies and cable television companies, to test and implement new systems. Therefore, what is needed, and what has heretofore been lacking in the art, is an effective method and system for delivering encoded and compressed digital signals to customers of hospitality establishments using a video services system.